In the middle of 1992, a clever Englishwoman, Tina Brown, left the
editorship of one American magazine, Vanity Fair, in order to assume the editorship
of another, The New Yorker. Many construed this move as an act of upward mobility,
but in the last issue of Vanity Fair that Brown edited, she published a proud,
regretful "Editor's Letter." "Vanity Fair," she declared,
"is the quintessential postmodern magazine. It is the great high-low show, able to
deliver Roseann Barr mud-wrestling side by side with Chancellor Kohl cogitating, or Demi
Moore's pregnant belly side by side with Martha Graham's dance aesthetic. It is a
cross-cultural synthesis that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It is all about
context . . ." (8).

For better or worse, Tina Brown is no Ph.D. Yet, her description of
"the postmodern" echoes that of the brilliant German cultural critic who now
teaches in America, Andreas Huyssen. Six years earlier, in 1986, in a massive book, After
the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Huyssen had traced the birth
of postmodernism from the matrix of the historical avant garde (for example, French
Surrealism). "Diverse and multifaceted" (x), Huyssen writes, postmodernism
rejects the powerful, imperious modern discourse that projects a "Great Divide"
between high art, which is masculinized, and mass culture, which is feminized. Roseann and
Martha Grahamboth have their interest for us, as active creators and not as passive
symbols.

Significantly, three of Tina Brown's four exemplary figures are women.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl cogitates in the midst of a mud-wrestling Roseann Barr, a
baby-carrying Demi Moore, and a movement-making Martha Graham. Whether this juxtaposition
would have pleased Socrates or Rodin's "Le Penseur," if this sculpture were to
speak, is an open question. Andreas Huyssen also rightly proposes that the re-emergence of
a powerful women's movement is another critical element of postmodernism. Women are
"self-confident and creative forces in the arts, in literature, film, and
criticism" (220). As significantly, Brown speaks of a "cross-cultural
synthesis." Earlier, Huyssen, too, suggested that postmodernists are increasingly
aware "that other cultures, non-European, non-Western cultures must be met by means
other than conquest or domination" (220)2.

In brief, Tina Brown, shake hands with Andreas Huyssen. You seem to agree that
postmodernism means the interlacing of high culture with pop; the interlacing of various
groups and societies; the interfusing of culture with diverse women's energies. You seem
to celebrate these green shoots in the field of time. I, too, celebrate them. Yet, even
when conjoined, Brown and Huyssen cannot exhaust the meanings of
"postmodernism." One of its primary meanings is that we can never certainly fix,
never firmly nail down, the meaning of much. Definers of postmodernism should tell us to
distrust their potential as bossy, nail-driving definers. Postmodernism eludes a stable,
universal definition. We agree to disagree about it. It may be a little thing, something,
some things, everything, nothing, or nothing but a Western concept that lacks relevance
for "non-Westerners."

Given all this, my title, "The Postmodern Element in the
Postmodern Humanities" is an example of waste, fraud, and verbal abuse. I would have
been humbler and more honest to offer "A Postmodern Element in Some Postmodern
Humanities" as my rubric. Nevertheless, our use of the word "postmodern,"
which increased dramatically after 1960, is neither wasteful nor fraudulent nor abusive.
For the word signifies a plausible conviction that something did happen, not to everyone
in every place, but to many people in many places after 1945. Of course, we have deep
continuities with the world before 1945. The postmodern builds on the modern world that
has mutated in the last several centuries. Still, something happened after 1945. Like
radiation, we will not be able to grasp and measure its effect for many years, but
something did happen after the construction and discovery of genocidal concentration
camps; the invention and explosion of the atomic bomb; the physical exploration of space
beyond the earth by human beings and machines; the slow, still incomplete collapse of
modern empires and their epic, rationalizing myths; the intensity of various liberation
and nationalist movements; the invention of the modern computer; and the international
reach of the electronic media. Today, for nearly everyone but professors of literature and
avid readers, Sharp is not the name of a literary character (the smart, conniving Becky
Sharp in Vanity Fair, William M. Thackeray's classic novel of 1847-48), but the
name of a Japanese electronics firm with global markets.

Let me note but three consequences of these shifts in the tectonic
plates of culture and society:

First, many in the arts prefer a particular style. With her customary
incisiveness, Marjorie Perloff lists its features, "violation, disruption,
dislocation, decentering, contradiction, confrontation, multiplicity, and indeter
minacy." She might have added a free-wheeling zappiness and quick cuts between images
and scenes (7-8). We cross and hybridize genres with swiftness and aplomb. We bend, not
only gender, but genre. We have, not only heteroglossia, but heterogenria. We prefer
idioms to axioms; open to fenced-in borders; a ludic and ironic to a regulatory and
hierarchical spirit. Together, the arts, entertainment, and the media overwhelm and
saturate us with images. By 1994, a cable television company will offer a system with 500
channels and perhaps 50 Saturday afternoon college football games. This is an
overly-fertilized field for couch potatoes. So awash with images, we find them flowing
into reality, as if images and realities were the meeting of two rivers. In this flux, we
no longer cleanly distinguish between representation and reality, between fiction and
fact. Is Mickey Mouse an "imaginary" or a "real" creature?

One of the works of the writer Ursula LeGuin is a moderate, gentle
example of a cross-hybridizing style. In 1985, she published Always Coming Home.
Juxtaposed against the punk rock of cyberfiction, Always Coming Home is a series of
pieces of chamber music played on exotic instruments. Its setting is a possible future in
Northern California. The human species has mingled with others. The narrator, "Stone
Telling," says, "The only other human people directly in my family lived in
Madidinou." The novelist is at once archaeologist and anthropologist of the future.
So positioning herself, she synchronizes past, present, and future. She presents her story
in a series of episodes, anecdotes, plays, poems, and rituals. In the "Back of the
Book" are notes and information about the language and linguistics, architecture,
animals, kinship ties, lodges and societies, food, music, and medicine of her people. This
archaeologist/anthropologist packages her work primarily as a book, but the book is in a
box, with a pastoral photograph of a cover and with a tape cassette of the music and
poetry of the Kesh.

Second, in our social and psychological life, we speak, not of
unchanging and life-long identities, but of performances and roles that change over a
lifetime. To be sure, the use of the theater as a metaphor for human life did not begin in
1945. Shakespeare did write "All the world's a stage,/And all the men and women
merely players" around 1600 (As You Like It, II, 7, 139-40). Nevertheless, our
sense of ourselves as performing selves is pervasive. At our worst, we speak of
"lifestyles," as if we could slip in and out of life's little dramas as if they
were an L.L. Bean shirt or a peignoir. If we feel that we do have an identity, a core of
self, it often seems fragmented, composed of bits and pieces from several sources. In an
autobiographical manifesto, Gloria Anzaldúa writes of reclaiming this self-divided core,
"I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian,
Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tonguemy woman's voice, my sexual voice, my
poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence" (207).

Third in our social and economic life, money and information jump
across national boundaries. The most affluent among us exchange pounds, liras, francs,
marks, dollars, and the yen with dazzling rapidity and often with demonic rapacity. We
catch glimpses of these exchanges: an ambitious American minister-entrepreneur paying
millions of dollars to buy a British telecommunications company, which already owns
liberal sitcoms made in Hollywood, in order to create an international network that will
push his arch-conservative version of family values; an Iraqi dictator laundering money
and credits through the Georgia branch of an Italian bank in order to build up a military
machine that the United States military, as part of a coalition, will then fight for 100
hours. Sorrowfully, all of our money, information, and technology have not brought global
peace and security. Postmodernism has not tamed the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Indeed, the riders of the red horse of war have smart bombs as well as swords. A starving
woman and her child cannot eat a microchip.

No matter how incomplete, these evolutions have influenced the
contemporary humanities. In turn, the contemporary humanities have helped to shape and
explain postmodernism. The word "humanities" has several parents, themselves
part of a cultural kinship system. In the Renaissance, "humanity" was "a
kind of learning distinct from divinity . . . and . . . from natural science." This
human learning was associated with the classics, with the Greek and Roman culture that was
being revived. In the 18th century, the humanities expanded to take in modern literature
and philosophy. In a related development, the humanist, revivifying classical cultures,
was a student of human matters. In still another related development, humanism, a
Renaissance movement, stressed man and his capacities. A "spiritual alternative to
orthodox Christianity," the perspectives of humanism would gaze at the possibilities
of human "self-development and self-perfection" (Gunn 119).

Today, the humanities retain their belief that their proper subject is
human life, particularly our cultural and aesthetic activities. However, the humanities
have also become a set of academic disciplines, a development inseparable from the growth
of modern higher education in the 19th and 20th centuries. The humanities now refer to
departments of classics, philosophy, literature and literary criticism, history and art
history, political theory and jurisprudence, anthropology, film studies. We now give and
get academic credit for doing "humanities."

Happily, postmodernism has pushed these disciplines in several
directions. Without abandoning tradition, postmodernism has corrected and enlivened them.
So doing, postmodernism has done to the humanities what Gertrude Stein told writers to do
to literature in "Patriarchal Poetry"(1927), "Reject rejoice rejuvenate
rejuvenate rejoice reject rejoice rejuvenate reject rejuvenate reject rejoice"(111).
Three of these directions are of unusual interest.

First, postmodernism has asked the humanities to cross disciplinary and
departmental borders. History , literature, anthropology, and media studiesoften under the
rubric of "cultural studies"are asking together how cultures work; how they make
moral and aesthetic judgements; how "high" art and other cultural artifacts fit
together. Second, together and separately, the disciplines have become far more open to
access and democratic in scope. They are studying groups that the traditional humanities
often ignored, trivialized, demonized, or sentimentalized: women of all races; racial and
ethnic groups; the poor and unlettered; the citizens of previously-colonized countries.
The postmodern humanities are then asking why, for what social and political and cultural
reasons, these groups were ignored, trivialized, demonized, or sentimentalized. Third and
finally, largely because of the influence of European philosophy, some humanists think of
themselves as "anti-humanist." For complex and controversial reasons, they query
the stellar role in the universe that the traditional humanities assigned to
"man" and human consciousness. Is man really the rational measure of all things?
These developments have their quarrels, internally and with each other. They have had,
however, a common consequence: the suspicion of the existence of a master narrative. Such
a master narrative tells an overarching, universal story about the human species that
compresses and squeezes the various experiences of all of us into an account of Man and
His Inevitable, Oom-pah-pah March Upwards Towards Sweetness, Perfection, Transcendental
Truth and Light, Masterpieces In Hand. Instead, the human species has told itself a number
of far more local stories about itself, some of which have survived, some of which have
died.

The postmodern rejuvenation of the humanities has also led to an
enlarged picture of the good humanist. The good humanist can be a woman of any race; a man
of any race. Though still a scholar, the good humanist likes questions as much as answers,
perhaps more than answers. The good humanist also knows that if we are to study what is
human, we must study, not simply Greece and Rome, crucial though they are; not simply
Europe and America, crucial though they are; but global societies. We must understand, not
simply the grand and the powerful, but the ordinary and the powerless as well. We must, in
brief, study all of us, in all our commonalities and diversities, our reciprocal
kindnesses and murderous intolerances. Moreover, no matter where each of us might have
been educated, we are all potentially good humanists. What matters is the quality of our
inquiries, our seriousness, scrupulousness, curiosity, generosity, freedom, degree of
moral imagination, and capacity for good thinking. The humanities, then, are more than a
set of texts and academic disciplines. They are an ethical activity, a way of approaching
and living in the world. This way is essential if we are to negotiate fairly our sense of
moral and cultural values in a worldly welter of competing values. The bad side of
postmodernism, the descent of a welter of competing values down to a killing ground of
ethnic and national rivalries, makes the saving power of the good humanist even more
urgent.

In the 1960s, Lionel Trilling contributed an eloquent, supple,
beautifully intelligent essay to our discourse about literature and the humanities,
"On the Teaching of Modern Literature," first published as "On the Modern
Element in Modern Literature." Trilling suggests that a great theme of modern
literature, perhaps its greatest, is "the disenchantment of our culture with culture
itself" (3). Trilling tells us that we are no longer Victorians like Matthew Arnold.
Instead, the historic sense of our literature is "a long excess of civilization to
which may be ascribed the bitterness and bloodiness both of the past and of the present
and of which the peaceful aspects are to be thought of as mainly contemptibleits order
achieved at the cost of extravagant personal repression, either that of coercion or that
of acquiescence; its repose otiose; its tolerance either flaccid or capricious; its
material comfort corrupt and corrupting; its taste a manifestation either of timidity or
of pride; its rationality attained only at the price of energy and passion"(16-17).

A postmodern reading of Trilling's essay can show how postmodern
attitudes have evolved in the past decades. Such a reading might find his description of
modern history still fitting, although much postmodern art has a ludic quality and women's
creativity now often exemplifies a Utopian spirit. It is, however, a mark of Trilling's
generation that his modern humanistic canon, the canon between the end of World War II and
Vietnam, is European and American, that it lacks any women or any "minority"
writers. His canon is Frazier, Nietzsche, Blake, Conrad, Mann, Freud, Diderot, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoi, Pirandello; a canon without the play of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
or the haunting wisdom of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois. It is a mark of
postmodernism that we want Trilling's canon, magisterial and wonderful though it is, to be
more elastic, more capacious. This elasticity and capaciousness is one consequence of our
shift from thinking about Self and The Other to thinking about self and others. In turn,
these shifts in thinking show postmodernists as pragmatists. That is, as cognitive agents,
they care less for fixed definitions of a person, place or thing than for complex
interpretations of them. Not surprisingly, then, as moral agents, postmodern pragmatists
care less for sermons and dictates about our lives than for conversations among us that
will enable us to choose how to live well.

However, postmodernismin general and in the humanitieshas failed to
install itself globally or even in the American academy. Its appeal is uneven, especially
in the domain of culture and morals. Not everyone cheers for Tina Brown and Andreas
Huyssen. Some claim that postmodernism is a cultural parody of Brownian motion, particles
in constant and silly motion. For others, the appeal of a monolithic traditionin culture
or morals or bothis irresistible. The picture of a Christian Fundamentalist minister
setting up a telecommunications empire is one image of an unstable, often dangerous
co-existence of tradition, his message, and postmodernism, his methods for delivering his
message. So, too, is the image of the writer Salman Rushdie condemned to death by some
Islamic fundamentalists for writing a book, The Satanic Verses.

In brief, we live among cultural differences and conflicts about the
meaning of culture and the value of cultural differences. Let me offer a benign example of
such flux, of a heteroglossia and heterogenria that are efflorescent, even fluorescent. In
1990, I chaired the fiction panel of the National Book Award. We ultimately gave first
prize to a wonderful novel by an African-American man, Middle Passage by Charles
Johnson. The panel was unfairly accused of being politically correct simply because the
prize did go to an African-American man. During our deliberations, we read only fiction
that citizens/residents of the United States had written. Despite the internationalism of
our economies and cultures, cultural nationalism still feeds literature. Some of what we
read was boiler-plate and beach-reading, but most was competent, eloquent, vital. What did
I note?

The persistence of what I call "normal literature,"
well-constructed, smoothly-textured, traditionally realistic, with a focus on individual
characters and their circumstances, especially their family and domestic circumstances.

Similarly, the persistence of the theme of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, that life is
a bazaar and bizarre, a fair that is not fair; that everything is for sale; that Lord
Hategoods rig our courtrooms; and that humanity, socially and psychologically, is corrupt
and fragile.

The absorption, the standardization, of modernist literary techniques:
the monologist as narrator; the landscape of alienation; the self-consciousness about
language and form; the use of the collage, juxtapositions of image and feeling. The most
favored source of epigraphs was Wallace Stevens. Such modernist techniques rested, as
comfortably as two books on a shelf, with normal literature. Both were part of a writer's
repertoire.

The interest in a formally self-conscious historical novel that blurs
the distinctions between fiction and history. The critic Linda Hutcheon calls such
blurring a prime feature of postmodernism and names it "historiographic
metafiction." I read the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde told from the point-of-view
of a servant girl, a fiction about a historical fiction; the story of Tolstoy and Egon
Schiele; the tale of murder on the West Coast of Florida.

The rise of "cyberpunk," of the blasphemous, druggy, computer
cowboy, consoled only by his computer console.3 He is the son, not of William
S. Hart, but William S. Burroughs.

Finally, I noted the extraordinary power and variety of
"outsider" voices, of the previously marginalized, of women of all races;
African-Americans; Hispanics; the now grown children of once-colonized nations; gay men
and lesbian women, some of the angriest and most grievous writing about AIDS. Becky Sharp
is now writing her own story. So is the both benignly satirized and maligned Miss Swartz,
the rich mulatto heiress of St. Kitts in Vanity Fair. There was a variety of zones,
positions, locales, and voices. In the midst of this was a tremendous book, a deep and
exhaustive elegy for the men of a particular race and generation, John Updike's Rabbit
at Rest.

No matter whether we like postmodernism or not, we must confront a
cultural dilemma that postmodern technologists have created. To use shorthand, the book is
undergoing an electronic trial by fire. The outcome of this trial is crucial for the
humanities, because the book and the idea of the text have been their great tool. Reading
and writing have been their dominant activities. Paradoxically, our postmodern books tell
of the threat to books. Our books send off warning signals of their own dangers. In
William Gibson's Neuromancer, Case, a cyberspace cowboy, goes to visit Finn,
perhaps a personification of Wintermute, an artificial intelligence.

Finn (a destabilizing pun on both the French and English meanings of "fin")
lives in a grungy, barricaded warehouse, full of junk, obsolete electronic gear and TV
sets. The walls are lined with "shelves of crumbling paperbacks. An enormous pile of
old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up .
. . "(48). Later, Case asks Finn if Finn can read his mind, or rather, if Wintermute
can read his mind. Finn tells him, "Minds aren't read. See, you've still got
the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print literate. I can access your
memory, but that's not the same as your mind" (170).

More accurately, the book is at the stake in three trials. The first is
the question of the presence of the reader. To be sure, reader response criticism, in
which readers help to create the meaning of a text, is a flourishing school of literary
criticism. To be sure, too, people do read. In one recent survey in the United States, 59%
of the respondents said that they read books frequently; 40% bought books often. 90% said
they read in order to "learn about other people's lives." 79% said they read
because they could "get away" from their problems. Books provide instruction and
the delights of escape (Americans and the Arts 13). Nevertheless, the reader may be
an endangered species. Trilling writes of the paradox of teaching modern literature, of
taming its radical and subversive energy in the stables of the classroom. His students
"respond to ideas with a happy vagueness, a delighted glibness, a joyous sense of
power in the use of received or receivable generalizations, a grateful wonder at how easy
it is to formulate and judge, at how little resistance language offers to their
intentions" (4-5). But for many of us, our students, no matter how nice and good they
might be, no matter how diligent and decent, have little truck with complex literary and
philosophical ideas and language at all. Close reading might well be the name of a bad
rock group. Postmodern grammarians might well be the Wayne of Wayne's World or a Valley
Girl. The canonical modern metaphor of an urban landscape, "like a patient etherized
upon a table," is less familiar than video metaphors. "The sky above the
port," William Gibson writes, "was the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel"(Neuromancer 3). If the reader is an endangered species, people who
love literature and textuality must rally like environmentalists around a stand of
first-growth timber.

The second stake is the question of the book itself, not as a
metaphysical but as a material and physical object. Symbolically, in 1992, William Gibson
published a self-consuming autobiographical novel. Not only does the object have etchings
in an ink that changes when exposed to light, the text itself, on a computer disk,
literally disappears after it (the story) scrolls on a screen (Fein). The wild geometries
and colors of cyberspace, like the simulated landscapes of virtual reality, may be
replacing the regularities and achromatopsic greyness of the printed page.4
Since 1990, Random House, the publisher, has sold 100,000 print copies of a 1-volume
encyclopedia, but nearly 400,000 electronic copies (Rogers 66). In November 1992, Newsweek
magazine announced that it would now issue a version on CD-ROM (computer diskread only
memory), the first general interest magazine to do so.

The electronic age still pays its tribute to the book. An entrepreneur
of the electronic age has launched Project Gutenberg. He will take 10,000 books. In order
to avoid copyright problems, they will be in the public domain. They will include The
Bible, O Pioneers!, Peter Pan, and The U. S. Constitution. By the
year 2001, a fabled date of the space fictions of postmodern culture, he will, he
promises, distribute a trillion electronic copies (Wilson). This is indeed a postmodern
great books enterprise. Even more ardently, the electronic age pays tribute to reading and
writing as skills, as competencies. It uses technology to praise literacy as a social
necessity and personal tool. In Fall 1992, American Airlines placed, in the little holder
for magazines and airsickness bags on the back of seats, an advertising brochure. The
commodities being sold are instructional video cassettes for golf and other sports, for
health, for self-esteem and personal growth, for fashion. There are also tapes for
reading, writing, and speaking, in both English and other languages, gathered together as
"the language arts." One cassette is Evelyn Wood's Reading Dynamics; another is
"Vocabulary," so that "You'll never be at a loss for words again."
Another is entitled, "Read Smarter/Speed Learning." For kids, grades 2-12, there
is "Video Tutor, Exploring the English Language," an 8-volume set for $199.60.
The collective name of these programs is Sybervision, Sybervision Learning Programs.

Yet each of these tributes contains a threat within it. For Project
Gutenberg will change the material shape of the book. The book will be like a vein of coal
to be strip mined by digitalization. The Sybervision Learning Programs, though they praise
literacy and language, are reticent about literature. In the face of these threats, two
responses are emerging. The first is conservation, the preservation of the book as a
material object to treat all books as if they were rare books. The humanistic commitment
to this is strong. In a survey of 317 humanists, Phyllis Franklin found 95% of them saying
that we must preserve original textsin an act of cultural ecology. Imagine, Franklin asks,
that the print era will conclude in 2055, 600 years after it began, after a slow and
evolutionary shift to electronic texts. Even if this were to happen, we would still need a
history of print, its artifacts and lovely residues (Franklin). The second response is
aesthetic, a recursive turn to the illuminated manuscript. Here the postmodern book
becomes at once visual and verbal. As a genre, it embraces the art book, concrete poetry,
the serious comic, the children's book that adults read, or the photonovella.5
Here the postmodern book is at once writerly and painterly; the reader a multi-literate.

Fortunately, the electronic age is also permitting humanists to perform
more accurately and bountifully. Tape, video, and audio are now an art form. Tape also
permits us to record sounds and images. We are able to preserve speakers and musicians,
dancers and actors. Imagine what the videocamera might have done with Socrates or Sappho.
In psycholinguistics, the technology of the computer is helping us to map the brain, to
find out which areas of the brain are responsible for which functions of language and how
these areas speak together.6 We are learning anew what it means to be a
language-user, to have concepts, to form words and sentences and paragraphs. In history,
we may be able to store copies of all our texts, to collate all our libraries, all our
cultural data. The question, I believe, is not whether we should do this, but how. Who
will maintain our banks of data? Who will have access? Who will name the files?

The third stake is far thicker, less a stake than a thicket of
branches. It is nothing less than the question of the human subject itself, the nature of
our human being, the subject matter of the humanities. This question is so vast that the
rubrics "from humanist to antihumanist" and "from modern to
postmodern" are as flat a description as a highway freeway sign is of the localities
to which is points. The fragmented self, which I mentioned before, is surely a familiar
figure in our postmodern psychic dramas. Here, the three faces of Eve are less a sign of
psychiatric disturbance than of a flexible psychic constructionand legitimately so. I
find, however, that an even more imaginative and suggestive postmodern figure for a
different human subject is "the Cyborg," a descendent of Frankenstein's
lamentable, lamenting monster child. The Cyborg's novelist is the brilliant feminist
theoretian and historian of science, Donna Haraway. In her mesh of a prose poem, "A
Manifesto for Cyborgs," Haraway writes of the Cyborg as a "cybernetic organism,
a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction." She finds the Cyborg in science fiction, modern medicine, modern
production, modern war. At once mapping our realities and promising our future, the Cyborg
is "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity"(192).
The Cyborg breaches traditional borders as easily as a tank might smash through a border
guard's hut of mud.

Obliterating borders, it (postgender, the Cyborg demands the neutral
pronoun) erases a profoundly influential distinction between nature and culture. One
border is that between animal and human. Indeed, as I once was about to praise Haraway as
a far-out prophet and a Utopian, I read a story in The New York Times (October 30,
1990). It reported a successful experiment with laboratory mice. These frisky creatures
now grew human organs, a lung, a pancreas. When I finished the story, Haraway was no
longer far-out but right here. A second border is that between the organism (animal and
human) and the machine. Indeed, one of speculative fiction's general motifs is the
collapse of this distinction. "We can read cyberpunk as an analysis of the postmodern
identification of human and machine" (Hollinger 205). In Neuromancer,
nerves are spliced; organs transplanted; molecules manipulated; eyes implanted. Crazed,
multiple amputees become whole men, armed with a prosthesis of mind and body. Indeed,
after death, exemplary personalities can be captured on CD-ROM. Jacked into a console,
they can speak, think, and even laugh.

What, then, are good humanists to do? Like our ancestors, we are on a
pilgrimage through human history. We are passing through, traveling through,
postmodernism. In this process, we are both individuals and an element in multiple
contexts: some social, some natural, some good for us, some ghastly. No matter what their
qualities, these contexts change us. We change them.7 On this pilgrimage, we
may be Cyborgs in training, not Christian and Christiana from a still earlier Vanity
Fair, that of John Bunyan (1678,1684). Our devils our Beelzebubs, Apollyons, and
Legionsare not always robustly and simply dramatized for us. We no longer have the
consolation of allegory, the genre that morally and psychologically demarcates the world
for us, labeling what is good, and what is bad. In fact, experience has taught us to fear
societies that set up these binary distinctions, exalting themselves while demonizing,
purging, and cleansing the other. Nor do we have another traditional comfort of the
pilgrimage, that of a morally clear and illuminating destination, a blessed and permanent
Quality Inn. We may have only the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Death, and Vanity Fair.
Moreover, if in the postmodern Vanity Fair, we said we wanted to buy only "the
truth," we might be asked, in certain humanities classrooms, why we had retained such
hermeneutic innocence.

However, the humanities, that resilient tramp, are with us. Much more
than we might suspect, the humanities, with their traditions and changes, are good company
for us now. If we interrogate them, with pleasure and patience and faithfulness, we can
discern their value for us. We may have to sever a single-minded identification of
literature with the printed book. We may have to abandon consoling beliefs in unsullied
objectivity and omniscient observers. The humanities, however, bear with them the maps of
the terrain of many pilgrimages through human history. Their number and substance should
give us courage. Some of these maps are themselves historical. They tell us where we have
been. They tell us of our traditions, so that we may choose to keep some, adapt others,
cast still others aside. Other maps the humanities carry comprise our narratives, the
stories and myths that we have told ourselves in order to describe our various
worldsstories about gods and goddesses, devils and witches, men and women, animals and
nature. Even the blasphemies of cyberpunk carry traditional narratives with them. A cowboy
in cyberspace is a cowboy; an Amazonian gun moll is still an Amazon and a moll. Still
other maps are ethical, our apprehensions of the just and the good. Still others are
aesthetic, our apprehensions of the beautiful. Still others are philosophical, our
apprehensions of the true. Finally, still other maps are linguistic, which tell us about
the languages with which we build maps themselves.

In his essay, "On the Modern Element in Literature," Matthew
Arnold separated modern literature from contemporary literature. So doing, he separated
literary history from a notion of progress. He saw modern literature emerging whenever a
great epoch and its literature were commensuratein classical Greece, for example. In
finding the modern, the just now, throughout history, he interestingly and unexpectedly
anticipated the postmodern with its theory that all of the past is present for our use.
Despite this prophecy, many of us in the postmodern humanities quarrel with Arnold. We
quiver at his use of the generic "he". We disagree with some, though not all, of
Arnold's elements of a modern epoch: peace in civil life; a tolerant spirit; a
"capacity for refined pursuits" (24); and most important, intellectual maturity,
a critical spirit, a search for laws. We might find some of these elements too Utopian, or
too genteel, or too disrespectful of working-class needs and culture, or epistemologically
unrealistic.

We might say this as well of another Arnoldian characteristic of a
modern age. He says that it seeks "intellectual deliverance" from a complex and
copious present. A modern age "contemplates . . . the spectacle of a vast multitude
of facts awaiting and inviting [our] comprehension. The deliverance consists in man's
apprehension of this present and past" (20). A century and more after Arnold's essay,
we continue to yearn for intellectual deliverance. Some postmodern literature, even the
grungiest, is replete with characters doing it in one way or another. In William Gibson's Mona
Lisa Overdrive, Gentry is driven to find the "Shape" of cyberspace, "an
overall total form." This search is his "grail" (75-76). The postmodern
humanities do caution us about the plausibility of a single, "true point of view from
which to comprehend this spectacle" and about a literature of completeness and
harmony. Yet, we do have delivers, even if these delivers carry only one menu, one
perspective, with them. Because our delivers carry but one perspective, we must find many,
let them play against each other. At their most ethical, then, the postmodern humanities
provide us with a balance of intellectual deliverance and intellectual skepticism about
the delivery system of a totalitarian perspective. Postmodern literature also has a genre
that offers us intellectual deliverance. It balances the collage form with an epic scope
and sweep. In the novel, an example is Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. In poetry, the
genre includes the descendents of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, The Maximus Poems
of Charles Olson, the later poetry of Adrienne Rich, Omeros by Derek Walcott. Such
texts are suspicious and self-conscious about their own adequacy, but they fix a shape of
things.

Let this particular fixing end with a list of names: Tina Brown,
Chancellor Kohl, Demi Moore, Martha Graham, Andreas Huyssen, Socrates, Rodin, William
Thackeray, Marjorie Perloff, Ursula LeGuin, Shakespeare, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gertrude Stein,
Lionel Trilling and all the names in his canon, W. E. B. DuBois, Salman Rushdie, Charles
Johnson, Wallace Stevens, Linda Hutcheon, Tolstoi, Egon Schiele, William S. Hart, William
S. Burroughs, John Updike, William Gibson, Sappho, Donna Haraway, John Bunyan, Matthew
Arnold, Thomas Pynchon, Whitman, Pound, W. C. Williams, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich,
Derek Walcott. These are, of course, the names that I have dropped over my pages.
Together, they are the merest drop in the great, leaking buckets of history and society,
but I have wanted to arrange them in a shapely way. In his novel, The Crying of Lot 49,
Thomas Pynchon invents a character, Oedipa Maas, a California housewife who becomes a
questor, seeking to "make sense" of things and of her legacies. For her, the
phrase is a haunting pun. When she makes sense of things, is she discovering/uncovering
what is there, or is she making things up, inventing order? The same task, to make sense,
has driven my paper and compels the postmodern humanities in their various interrogations.
The cautionary pun on "making sense" haunts both the humanities and me. The
humanists of the next millenium will, I believe, ask how well, how reasonably and how
imaginatively, how fairly and how decently, with what lack of vanity, we made sense of
thingseven though our languages, like our histories, bred ghosts that howled out with
reminders of our divisions, inventions, and fragilities.

Notes

1 Earlier versions of this paper were given as the luncheon
address at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association in October 1992, and as the
Jerard Lecture in the Humanities, Washington State University, December 1992. I am very
grateful to Professor Neila C. Seshachari of Weber State University and editor of Weber
Studies for her support.

2 Huyssen's map of postmodernism also features ecological
and environmental questions.

3 Fredric Jameson calls cyberpunk "henceforth, for many
of us, the late supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of the
late capitalism itself" (419).

4 William Gibson, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, defines
cyberspace as "the sum total of data in the human system . . . " (308); in Neuromancer
as "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators,
in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system" (51).

7 Interestingly, the notion of process may also prove to be
important to psycholinguistics, to the learning of language. When, a neuroscientist has
written, we think about the mind, we must describe its "structural, functional and
molecular variety." We must also consider "plasticity, the tendency of synapses
and neuronal circuits to change as a result of activity. Plasticity weaves the tapestry on
which the continuity of mental life depends. Action potentials not only encode
information, their metabolic aftereffects alter the circuits over which they are
transmitted" (Fischbach 54).

WORKS CITED

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Trilling, Lionel. "On the Teaching of Modern Literature." Beyond
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